Free Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City by John Banville Page B

the papacy, and built his empire on the core of Bohemia and Moravia. His 'Golden Bull' of 1356 formed a new constitution for the empire, set out the procedures for imperial elections and the rights of the seven electors, declaring their domains indivisible. Prague expanded under Charles's rule; the horse and cattle markets, today's Wenceslas and Charles Squares, were incorporated into the New Town, work began on St Vitus's Cathedral, and the first university in central Europe was instituted. Charles was an extraordinarily liberal and enlightened ruler, highly intelligent and richly cultured, a vivid historical mover and achiever. Yet I cannot see him. The image I have of him is of one of those statues that are carried aloft in religious processions, gilded and impassive and mechanically nodding. Far more real to me is his blind old dad, lover of jousts and military adventuring, last seen hacking sightlessly all round him with his great-sword on the field at Crecy.
    The single historical figure who most epitomises old Prague is the Emperor Rudolf II. This melancholy madman, gull of all manner of mountebanks and charlatans but also a patient patron of the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, was born in 1552 into one of the more complicated Habsburg lines. His father, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, son of the Emperor Ferdinand I and Emperor Charles V's brother, married Charles's daughter Maria. All right, all right, let us put it another way. Rudolf's father was Emperor Maximilian II. Maximilian was the son of Emperor Ferdinand I, who was brother to Emperor Charles V, founder of the Habsburg dynasty - the daddy of them all, as one might say. Maximilian married his cousin Maria, daughter of Charles V. As the attentive reader will already have spotted, this of course meant that Rudolf was by double lineage the great-grandson of Joanna the Mad! 13 No wonder there were blemishes in Rudolf's psychological profile. Still, what family does not have its own version of Mad Joanna, squawking and jumping up and down on her perch somewhere amid the denser foliage of the family tree?
    At the age of eleven, on the insistence of his mother, the mournful Maria, Rudolf was packed off from the relative liberality of his father Maximilian's court at Vienna to live in the household of the Spanish King Philip II, his mother's brother, there to be taught some of the harsher realities of life as a Catholic monarch in a Europe facing into the horrors of the Counter-Reformation. During the seven years he spent in Madrid, Rudolf became, in Ripellino's words, 'a perfect "Spaniard", acquiring the customs and masks of that dissembling monarchy. Bigotry, intrigues, religious pomp, suspicion, persecution of heretics, the Inquisition's funeral pyres, the illusion of boundless majesty, vainglory on land and at sea such was his school.' This was a disastrous experience for the dreamy and otherworldly Rudolf, who was more interested in alchemy, literature, and the wilder shores of art - it was Rudolf who brought Arcimboldo, that master of the grotesque, to Prague and made him one of his chief court painters - than in power and the machinations of European politics. Ripellino is firm in his conviction that the Spanish experience was a 'fatal influence' on the young man's character: 'it heightened his morbid shyness, his yearning for solitude, and planted the seeds for the megalomania and persecution complex that later so obsessed him.' Spanish influence became very powerful at Rudolf's court, as the Jesuit-educated younger generation displaced the older, liberal Catholic faction. The new men, supported by Rome and Madrid, were the ones who prosecuted fiercely the Counter-Reformation measures that would lead, after Rudolf's time, to the Thirty Years War. So strong was the Spanish presence that in Bohemia the more fervent Catholics were known as, 'Spaniards'.
    Jealous, paranoid, hypochondriacal, incurably melancholy, obsessed with the passage of time